July 2011

In March we wrote about our first attempt to find out if certain broadcast email clients delivered email better than others (read the original post here). When those results proved inconclusive—and a little mysterious—we promised a second try. Here’s what we knew going into the revised study:

When your organization sends out bulk email, you have to accept the fact that not all messages will be delivered. Many different factors make this a reality. Your supporters may supply inaccurate or false email addresses, causing messages to bounce. Or your constituents’ email clients might look at your campaign and decide it’s spam, catching the email in a filter before it reaches its destination. To some extent, that’s the nature of the beast. But we wondered if that beast could be tamed by better understanding what causes those undeliverables.

There are many different reasons for emails to get caught by spam filters. They may be flagged as spam based on keywords in the body of the message, like “pharmaceuticals” or “Nigerian royalty.” They may lack a link for recipients to opt out of your list, which should be included in every message. Or, since most organizations prefer to send out HTML-formatted emails because of the visual appeal, yours might get flagged if you don’t also have a plain-text version available.

Mail server administrators generally like to keep their systems free of unsolicited messages, for obvious reasons. One of the ways they do this is by subscribing to blacklists (or block lists) run by organizations that create a database of IP addresses known to send spam. When email is sent by a server, it can be tracked back to that server by an IP address, and these lists catalogue which IP addresses are recommended to be turned away. In practice, this means that incoming emails are checked by the server against this database, and if they come from a “bad” source they’re rejected. Domains get put on these lists when enough people complain, or “flag” messages that originate from them. It’s relatively difficult to get off of one of these lists, and it can take some time.

Due to the sheer volume of email put out by broadcast email tools, it’s not hard to imagine that these services have to contend with blacklists on a regular basis. This brings up the problem of guilt by association. When you’re using a broadcast email tool, you’re sharing an email server with other organizations and businesses. Their bad behavior has the potential to negatively influence your email deliverability.

Given the hassle of getting off a blacklist, prevention is the best medicine when it comes to spam. Broadcast email tools usually try to prevent bad sending practices. You may be required to send yourself test versions of every email, or each email may be reviewed by a member of the vendor’s staff. Other tools have a voluntary “spam checker” tool that lets you analyze each message for problems that may increase its potential for being caught in a filter.

Next week, we’ll share the results of our study. Check back here on Monday to see what we learned. 

Google unleashed their latest attempt to grab the focus from Facebook and Twitter with Google+, a Social Network that, at first glance, looks like a Facebook clone, but differentiates itself in at least one significant way: the people you communicate with on Google+, along with the way that you do it and the tools for inviting and connecting people are far superior to the social networking competition and they emulate the way we communicate in real life.  This makes for a very engaging and, once you have a handle on it, comfortable social network right out of the gate.

Now, most of my nptech friends are working hard to imagine what kind of applications this new platform will offer for constituent engagement and marketing.  This is a bit of a challenge, because the beta-release is specifically designed for individuals, not organizations; Google plans to open it up to companies later, with some targeted functionality. That's too speculative for my taste. 

Lots of smart nptech people have described Google+ and shared some insightful first impressions -- here are some of my favorites:

Beth Kanter's first impressions

NTEN's Amy Sample Ward on Google+ privacy and control

Frogloop's everrything you always wanted to know about Google+

Her's how I sum up the major difference between Google+ and the social ntworking competition: on Google+, you're a person.  On Facebook and Twitter, you're a persona.  This is an easier case to make for Twitter than Facebook -- Twitter's only privacy offering is the option to block your tweets, and only a small percentage of users do that.  Most of us know that we are broadcasting to the world on that medium and act accordingly, being mindful that we are establishing an onliine reputation, not having a fireside chat.  Facebook suffers from an identity crisis: it started out as an intimate, friends only network, but, in recent years, has been re-egineered to default to a Twitter-like public stream.  It can be restricted, but even if you define lists that separate out friends, colleagues and family, targeting messages to them is still a bit of work, particularly when compared to Google+.  Accordingly, most of my friends use the platform to share information broadly, rather than converse.  It is overall more personal information than what you see on Twitter, but it's not interpersonal.  

Google+, by contrast, allows you to easily restrict your post to the circles of contacts that you define and/or individuals that you're connected to.  If they're not on Google+, you can include them in your circles anyway and share via email.  This makes it more like an email extended conversation than a separate social network -- I'll be surprised if we don't see some merging of the Google+ Circles and GMail Contacts soon.  Add to that the Hangouts feature -- group video chat -- and Google+ isn't really focused on sharing information as much as it is on conversing.  It can function like Twitter and Facebook, but the default is a little bit richer.  We'll see what happens when the thrill wears off, but the initial activity seems to well reflect this -- we're finding it to be a very engaging platform.  My friends haven't abandoned Facebook and Twitter, but I can see that the questions and conversational posts are going straight to G+, while the shared links and cute cat pictures are remaining on Twitter and FB.

Web strategist that I consider myself to be, when I look at these networks, I think about them not as social networks, but as future operating systems.  I firmly believe that Windows, Linux and OSX are all going to become less and less important as feature platforms -- they already are.  People are starting to abandon them for IOS and Android, patforms for running mobile apps.  As HTML5 and Ajax make web apps more sophisticaed -- and those apps run well regardless of the operating system -- the IOS and Android-specific apps will wane as the cross-platform web apps take precedence.  At that point, the function of a network operating system, regardless of the hardware platform, will be to support communication and sharing, better befitting the name "network".  Google+, Facebook, and the like will mirror the functionality of business portals like Sharepoint (we already see them adopting the social networking features).  

In this near future, where the social network IS the network, who's going to win?  The ones, like Facebook, that restrict the use of the data and push everything to be public, or the ones like Google+, that make it easy for users to extract, backup and control their information and that have intranet/extranet/internet functionality built in at the core? 

Which company is going to get this concept quicker -- the one that started as a social network, or the one that has been developing a web-based operating system for years, Google ChromeOS, which already works as a shell for existing Google products, much as Google+ is conceived as an extension of the same?

I don't think Google+ is simply challenging Facebook.  It's still Google challengng Microsoft and Apple. Facebook might well be a victim of that battle because, once this network as OS matures, we'll all have to ask ourselves why we would use the one with Farmville instead of the one with Google Apps.  Or the one that facilitates collaboration and teamwork over branding and sharing cat videos.  I see Google+ as the evolution of the Google operating system, not just another social network.  It will be very interesting to watch it grow.

Way back in 2007, Idealware conducted a survey of foundation grants managers as a kickoff to our first Consumers Guide to Grants Management Software.  As many as 311 grants managers provided information about their current software, rating both the perceived importance and the effectiveness of this software at handling a list of 30 grants management software attributes.  

You can see our summary of the results online.

It's pretty old now, but we got a request for the raw data, so we thought we'd "free" the anonymized results. Want to see what folks had to say for yourself? The data, in Excel form, is online.

By the way, we're updating that Consumers Guide to Grants Management Software and will have a new report to release later this year. Stay tuned.